We organized this project to deepen understanding of complex relations between processes of personal development and the broader dynamics of social and cultural change. More specifically, we organized an ongoing dialogue between two different theoretical perspectives on the question: How do subjectivities develop in the tension between social identity-construction and meaning-making, and personal emotional meaning?

Hanne Haavind’s work is positioned within cultural psychology, emphasizing contextual power relations and explicit and negotiated meanings that are exchanged between the participants. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen draws on psychoanalytic approaches that emphasize unconscious meaning and emotional investment. Taking these differences as our point of departure, we invited 19 other scholars to join us in exploring relations between personal identity and development, on the one hand, and social and cultural processes of change on the other. We attended to complex temporal dimensions of both the social and the personal, posing questions about the psychological development of children and young people in a historical period when previously relatively stable categories of identity, like gender and age, have been increasingly challenged by rapid institutional transformation and cultural diversity. Each of the participants in our research group has done theoretically informed empirical work that addresses another of our core questions: How do children and young people develop through contexts, and how are contexts transformed through new generations of young people growing up?

The participants brought a range of theoretical positions and methodological approaches to the reading and interpreting of empirical materials. We organized the CAS year into four sessions, each with a different configuration of participants who focused on specific pieces of empirical data (e.g. transcripts of open-ended interviews and/or notes from naturalistic observations) contributed by one or two members of the group. This gave the larger group an opportunity to try out and compare different analytical approaches, and it opened multiple paths of generative dialogue that continued through the year. Each of the research teams formed during the four sessions involved intellectual collaboration among people who had never worked together before; each of the teams developed theoretically informed inquiries and analytical approaches which resulted in at least one paper. Some of the papers are now under review for journal publication; others are still in process.

Looking back, the greatest achievement of the year was the quality of our engagement with one another. The work in each session was intensive, and most complaints were not about disagreements but rather about how quickly the time past. To say that the group worked hard on the problems they encountered does not mean that we solved them or reached ultimate conclusions.